Dire picture painted on fossil fuel use

PARIS－Burning the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves would unleash 3.5 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions－seven times the remaining carbon budget to cap global heating at 1.5 C, according to the first public inventory of hydrocarbons released on Monday.

Human activity since the Industrial Revolution, largely powered by coal, oil and gas, has led to just under 1.2 C of warming and brought with it ever fiercer droughts, floods and storms supercharged by rising seas.

The United Nations estimated that Earth's remaining carbon budget－the amount of pollution we can add to the atmosphere before the 1.5 C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement is missed－to be around 360 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, or nine years at the current emission levels.

The UN's annual Production Gap assessment last year found that governments plan to burn more than twice the fossil fuels by 2030 that would be consistent with the climate goal.

But until now there has been no comprehensive global inventory of countries' remaining reserves.

The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels seeks to provide greater clarity on oil, gas and coal reserves to fill knowledge gaps about global supply and to help policymakers better manage their phaseouts.

The registry includes data from over 50,000 oil, gas and coal fields in 89 countries. That covers 75 percent of global reserves, production and emissions, and is available for public use, a first for a collection of this size.

For example, US coal reserves embed 520 billion tons of CO2 equivalent.

The remaining fossil fuel reserves contain seven times the emissions of the carbon budget for 1.5 C.

"We have very little time to address the remaining carbon budget," Rebecca Byrnes, deputy director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, who helped compile the registry, told Agence France-Presse.

"As long as we're not measuring what is being produced, it's incredibly hard to measure or regulate that production." The registry has emissions data for individual oil, gas or coal projects.

Byrnes said the inventory could help apply investor pressure in countries with large hydrocarbon reserves, but saw little prospect of popular pressure to shift away from fossil fuels.

"We're not kidding ourselves that the registry will overnight result in sort of a massive governance regime on fossil fuels. But it sheds a light on where fossil fuel production is happening to investors and other actors to hold their governments to account," she said.

The inventory also highlighted large variability in the price of carbon between countries, with taxes on emissions generating nearly $100 per ton in Iraq, but just $5 per ton in Britain.

Agencies via Xinhua